The Girl in the Blue Beret Read online

  “Oh, it was normal, Marshall!” said Pierre loudly. “The Germans would never suspect a schoolgirl. Therefore, many young girls were employed.”

  “There were many girls in the Résistance,” said Angeline. “My aunt flirted with the Germans to distract them while her friends slipped food from the back of the supply truck! They were sixteen, she has told me, no more.”

  “Be thankful, Marshall,” Gisèle said. “Your countrymen have never known such times, when children must become combatants.”

  “I was hoping someone here would remember some of the contacts in Paris,” Marshall said. “There was a young man I remember especially. He came several times to the place where I was hiding, bringing messages and supplies, and he went south on the train with me. He was called Robert, but I have no idea what his last name was! I want to say it was Julien, but I don’t know why. Maybe that was his false name, his nom de guerre? I don’t even know if the family I stayed with in Paris was really named Vallon.”

  “But you knew our names,” Pierre said. He explained that Vallon was more than likely correct. “The code names were usually a first name, used only for clandestine acts like sabotage. I was Emile.” He laughed. “Gisèle teased me, calling me Emile!”

  “Dear Emile!” she said, patting his arm affectionately. “My secret lover!”

  Nicolas offered to check with some local sources for information about the regional escape lines. “I will search for records of Vallons in Paris. And I would like to find those women in black for you,” he added.

  Pierre said, “The chief contact for the Résistance in this area, the captain, who took his directions from London, is unfortunately disappeared—deceased.”

  “His family may have a logbook or something,” Angeline suggested.

  “I wrote nothing down,” said Pierre. “The work I did—all was in my head. It was dangerous for people to put names in writing. To put anything in writing.”

  “We kept the address book of the aviateurs,” Gisèle reminded him.

  Pierre served some homemade cider from an amber bottle with a clamp top. The cider was rich and strong, and Marshall sipped cautiously, remembering a pint of moonshine from his youth.

  “We didn’t serve this on the airline,” he said.

  Pierre smoked a cigarette and talked on about the war.

  “To get a potato for supper was a clandestine act, but here in the country the farmers had more. When we heard the American tanks, and we saw the Germans on the street, standing around, confused, we grew bold. They knew it was all over, and we could not help taunting them even more than usual, asking them if they would eat their potatoes cooked the French way. We said, ‘You must be looking forward to going home! See the wife, the Kinder.’ ” Pierre stopped to laugh heartily, then continued more soberly. “Of course we knew and they knew that they might go to a prison when the Allies prevailed, or they might find conditions at home even worse than here, for us. We knew their country was bombed to hell. But we enjoyed saying, ‘Oh, it will be so grand to see the wife and the Kinder and go to the circus and eat nice strudel.’ We were cruel. We didn’t care. It was a joy. How could we restrain ourselves? But they still could have executed us all!”

  He nodded contemplatively. “What causes this? Such barbarity. A war. All these horrors, when men sink lower than beasts. How did it happen? Can it happen again? This is why I encourage Nicolas and Angeline to inform their daughters. I never stopped informing Nicolas. Of course he was there. He saw it. But we must tell. We must tell.”

  “I didn’t see everything,” said Nicolas. “But I’ve been thinking about it ever since. I am so fortunate that my parents and I survived.”

  “Not Cousin Claude,” Pierre said.

  “Oh, the man with the farm, where I hid?” Marshall asked.

  “Oh, yes. Maybe I did not mention it when I wrote you—at the end of the war? Claude was killed in his barn. Blown up by accident—one of our own explosives. It was a terrible thing.”

  “I will never forget that night,” said Gisèle. “That’s when we tried to protect Nicolas, and not let him see.”

  “I was at his funeral,” Nicolas said. “I saw him dead. I knew what happened.”

  Marshall pictured the barn. And Claude. And the cat. Félix.

  NICOLAS AND ANGELINE offered to take Marshall to his train. As they prepared to leave the house, Nicolas handed the flight jacket to Marshall.

  “For you.”

  “Oh, no. It’s yours.”

  “But I kept it for you, that you may have it again one day.”

  “But I gave it to you, and your wife likes it! I have no use for it. I really want you to have it.”

  Angeline seemed pleased, and Marshall was glad to relinquish the jacket again, but he thought later he might have misunderstood Nicolas’s offer. Damn my French, Marshall thought.

  HE BOARDED AN EARLY-EVENING train at Chauny, and watched out the window as the growing twilight gradually dimmed the gray-green fields. The train paused at Noyon and Compiègne, stations he couldn’t recall. When he was on that train to Paris in 1944, he had been given precise instructions, but riding as a French worker had been difficult. He was wary and hesitant. Another flyer, the bombardier Delancey, was being sent with him, but they did not sit together. Marshall didn’t know the ordinary behaviors of French people on their daily business. Some women in mesh head wraps were laughing, but the rest of the car was quiet. At Compiègne a rush of people boarded the train, and a gray-haired man in a dark jacket sat by him, mumbling a question—probably “Is this seat taken?” Marshall thought his one-word reply had a scared-rabbit tone. He was sure he would be found out when he stood up, over six feet tall among the modestly sized Frenchmen. He was aware that the train could be bombed at any moment—bombs from the Allies, bombs from the Underground.

  The particulars of experience often escaped him, but the outlines and the shapes of landscapes and skyscapes lingered in his mind. It was a discipline gained from flying, in always knowing where the North Star was, where the horizon lurked, which way was up. He had learned the outlines of airfields, the configurations of runways, the placement of hangars, the skylines of cities, the gentle curve of the ocean horizon, the wheeling constellations overhead.

  From his seat on the train now, he watched as the farm fields yielded to ragged outskirts, which melted into factory buildings, which gave way to the switching yards of the Gare du Nord. It had been a long time since he had wanted to spend a day talking and laughing with a group of people. His stay with the Alberts in 1944 overlapped his visit now, as if he had jumped over time and might still be hiding behind an armoire or in a haystack with a cat. The shadowy figures of the brave people who had saved his life—in barns, in hidden rooms, on bicycles—were coming clearer, almost reachable. He welcomed them. After the ease and pleasure of returning to Chauny, he could almost believe that the girl in the blue beret would be waiting when the train pulled in to the station.

  17.

  BACK IN HIS PARIS HOTEL, ALTERNATING BETWEEN INSOMNIA and waking dreams, he could hear Annette Vallon’s singsong French, her playful teasing. During those three weeks in 1944 he thought he saw the soft baby fat of her cheeks grow thinner. Her mother insisted on giving him the largest portions of food. “You are large, monsieur,” Mme Vallon told him. “We do not need so much.”

  “I don’t want this,” Annette said, moving a carrot on her plate. “You may have it.”

  Perhaps she still needed the nourishment of milk, he thought. She needed meat. The milk ration, for children only, was for her younger sister, Monique. Food had been more plentiful in the country, on the farms and in Chauny with the Alberts.

  He remembered the way Annette and her mother hugged so casually. He could see in them a happiness that persisted despite the hardships of wartime. Mme Vallon had embraced him too. She was small, and she had to reach up, but her warmth momentarily blotted out the war. He thought of his own mother, when she was a young woman, before she got sick.<
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  Marshall had hardly ever paid attention to cooking, but in Paris food was so scarce it became a fixation. He watched Mme Vallon practice her art. With a small piece of chicken, a dab of saved butter, and some elaborate fussing with the pots on the wood-stove, she made a terrine, a sort of chicken Jell-O with a yellow layer at the bottom. She flavored it with bits of dried herbs.

  “You need your strength for your journey,” she said, giving him a second helping.

  He didn’t know when the journey would be, or how.

  He offered them some francs from his escape kit. He had two thousand francs, oversized bills like pages from a book. The portrait of the woman in a helmet was Joan of Arc, he learned years later.

  They would not take his money. “We do this gladly,” Mme Vallon insisted. “It is our necessity.”

  “But you could buy a rabbit and some eggs,” he argued.

  One evening she cooked a pot of tripe—the only item the butcher had left, she said. Marshall was revolted when he saw her scrubbing and soaking the hog’s entrails that afternoon. He ate sparingly, but M. Vallon treated the dish as a delicacy, making soft groans of appreciation.

  “With more butter and some cream, this would be almost divine,” he said, but everyone knew he was pretending.

  Annette nibbled. Monique did not speak at the table. Marshall hardly remembered her. A child of eight or ten?

  They spoke English with him. Annette listened carefully when the adults spoke. Then she tried to offset the anxiety in their voices with her own girlish chatter. Her mother indulged her, he thought. He could see in her mother’s face what Annette would become. Mme Vallon wore her hair swept up, with long hairpins holding a pile of it. In the corner of the sitting room she sometimes brushed Annette’s hair, twirling it with her fingers. Annette’s hair was medium length, dark brown with curls framing her face. She wore no lipstick. Her clothing hung loosely on her thin frame. On Sundays she washed and ironed her blue smock for the school week. It was what the girls wore to protect their clothing, she explained, and it was a sort of uniform.

  He remembered her sitting at a table, working with the buckles of her cowhide school bag, which she called her vache. She placed her books and papers inside purposefully—like a pilot packing his brain bag, he thought now.

  In the morning, Mme Vallon went to the market early, and M. Vallon left soon after for his office. Marshall did not remember now where Monique had been.

  “Time for your French lesson,” Annette announced.

  The large apartment was cold, and Marshall was wearing three sweaters.

  “Pronunciation, s’il vous plaît,” he said. “I’m lost.”

  “My English teacher thinks I have a ‘bad’ accent,” she told him. “She tries to teach the way they say in England. Tomato—we say tuh-maht, they say tuh-MAHT-oe; that’s easy. But you say toe-MAY-toe. I have fear that my teacher will recognize where I am getting an American accent!”

  She made him a tea of herbs, plentiful because the Germans detested herbs and had not appropriated all of them. She rubbed a piece of leftover bread with some mint and a little oil and warmed it on the stove. He had built a small fire with some chips of coal and paper so that her mother could make coffee, a substitute made of acorns—or perhaps cockleburs and birdseed. Marshall didn’t know.

  “Perhaps Maman will bring an egg. I will cook it for you in this fragrant oil.”

  “Mais non. You and your mother should have it.”

  “No, you have half, and Maman and I share half.” She wiped the pan with a lump of bread she had saved. She smiled. “Perhaps Maman will bring some butter. And cinnamon.”

  “And cornmeal.”

  She didn’t understand, and when he explained she turned up her nose.

  “One doesn’t eat that,” she said. “Food for the animals.”

  “Then maybe she will bring some more of those delicious pig guts we had last night!”

  “Les tripes! Mmm. Bonnes. Bonnes.”

  They laughed.

  She made him pronounce all the words they had discussed. The words for corn and cinnamon and butter. Eggs. Bread.

  “Perhaps I make us too hungry,” she said apologetically, reaching to pull up her limp white sock that was sagging into her shoe.

  “It’s all right to talk about food,” he said. “I think about food every day!”

  “We should speak of other things,” she said emphatically. “Now, let’s learn flowers.”

  “Do I need to know flowers? I was never any good with botany. Botanique?”

  “Well, then, trees. It is necessary to know les arbres.” She led him through a list of trees, then some animals. “At our summer house in Normandy, we had geese and chickens. We could have stayed there since the beginning of the war, when everyone suddenly left Paris, but we returned. Maman insisted we were in more danger there than here. My father had to be here, and I must be here to do what I can to help,” she said.

  “Do your parents hide many aviators? How do you feed them?” He wasn’t supposed to ask his helpers questions, so the Krauts couldn’t force anything out of him if he got caught.

  She shrugged. “We manage.”

  “And what do you do?” He knew she went somewhere Friday afternoons after school.

  “You are not to know.” She smiled. “The Germans, if they are on the bus, I put my books beside me and occupy as much space as possible. I enjoy making inconvenience for them. Also, it is amusing to drop my books at their feet. In a way they are gentlemen. ‘Oh, mademoiselle, I must assist you!’ and in another way they are ready to make the arrest. But they do not, not the schoolgirls. So they think they are kind and helpful, but we are laughing at them. Every little bit of trouble we can cause, innocently—‘Oh, it is only the schoolgirls’—is a way to express our frustration.”

  “Should you be provoking the Germans?” he asked. “It sounds dangerous.”

  “I know. But how can one resist?”

  Mme Vallon was at the door, with her groceries, mostly rutabagas.

  “Your usual catch,” Marshall said, but he could not make the expression understood.

  “If this war ever ends, I will never touch another rutabaga!” Mme Vallon said, depositing the bags on the kitchen table.

  “Did you find anything else?” Annette asked, poking into the smaller bag.

  “I have ten grams of butter—very precious. I have the sugar. We must get along without even ersatz coffee. Tomorrow, they said. No bread, of course. All the farina is going to Germany. Maybe our men working at the factories will get some of it.” Mme Vallon rummaged deeper in the bag. “One cheese ration.”

  “Let me imagine,” Annette said. “Tonight, baked rutabaga with cheese. A soupçon of butter.”

  “A tiny pinch of sugar with the butter,” her mother said with a smile. “I have some herbs.”

  THEY WARNED HIM to stay away from the dining room window, which gave onto the street, but he could watch from a side angle through the lace curtains. He saw only an occasional vehicle—a Kübelwagen or a Mercedes-Benz flying a small flag with a swastika on it. The building was on a corner, and his bedroom overlooked a small side street. The blackout curtains at night cocooned him. He heard few traffic noises. People were out in the mornings and flocking home late in the day, after dark. He watched them, did exercises to keep his muscles from cramping with inactivity, and studied French. For months as a pilot trainee he had studied mechanical manuals: hydraulic pressures, lift angles. In January he had been keeping house in his barracks, writing lovesick letters to Loretta, trying to squelch suspense over the next mission. During the day he attended lectures and flew trial runs, and ten times in two months he had been out on wild sky rides, lugging bombs. A few times he had visited the villages near the base, and once he had been to London. Now, he was trying to talk French and reading Verlaine. He was almost twenty-four years old. He had stepped into an alternate life, like Alice in Wonderland, down a rabbit hole—but without his Bugs Bunny jacket.
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br />   There was hardly anything he could do to help Mme Vallon. He envied Robert, the good-humored young guy who came by bringing fresh meat wrapped in paper. He brought cigarettes. Marshall listened for his bicycle, arriving in the downstairs foyer. Robert was slender but powerfully built, with thick hair and dark eyes. He always seemed to be on urgent business. Marshall imagined him as a daring Resistance agent out gathering intelligence or transporting explosives, while Marshall himself sat out the war behind lace curtains.

  Annette teased Marshall for lolling around the house while she worked so hard at school. She teased him for his efforts at French, even while she patiently coached him. And she teased him for the rude outfits he had to wear—the layers of old sweaters, the too-short pants, the rough socks, the cloth slippers with the seams loosened to make room for his huge toes.

  At the table the family managed to make their meager dinners last for hours, regaling one another with jokes at the Germans’ expense and family stories that Marshall thought must have been often told.

  “The wine makes us convivial,” said Mme Vallon. “We forget the difficulties.”

  M. Vallon did not speak of his work at the city hall, but Marshall observed that he came home with extra ration books.

  “If they fail to account for the number, who is to know?” Marshall overheard M. Vallon say—but in French, so Marshall wasn’t sure.

  Once M. Vallon said to Marshall, “I am an honest man. I have always been an honest man. It is for honor, for patriotism, that we take care of the aviateurs.”

  “We are not violent,” said Mme Vallon. “But we can do this.”

  “The Germans were a people of culture,” M. Vallon said sadly. “I do not permit myself to believe that every German connives in this conquest.”

  “We are ancient enemies,” Mme Vallon said.

  From time to time, hints of despair broke through the Vallons’ determined tranquility. But they quickly assured themselves that de Gaulle and his Free French troops would liberate Paris soon. Any day the débarquement of the Allies would begin. In the evenings the family played card games and conversed. At nine o’clock, Annette’s parents tuned in to the BBC on the wireless for the news of France. Chut! Shh!